Then there is the wilder, defiantly odd Donne, typified by the poem for which most people know him, ‘The Flea’. His congregation – merchants, aristocrats, actors in elaborate ruffs, the whole sweep of the city – came to his sermons carrying paper and ink, wrote down his finest passages and took them home to dissect and relish, pontificate and argue over. The announcement was streamed to readers around the world via the Baillie Gifford Prize social media channels. Google her and you will find a photograph of Rundell elegantly poised on the crenellated roof of All Souls.

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He is protection against those who would tell you to narrow yourself, to follow fashion in your mode of thought. There was something in the way a verse letter could elevate the details of the day-to-day and render it sharp-edged and memorable that he cherished. Humble because John Donne’s life and work lie on a path well-trodden by scholars; flashy because Rundell is a playful, incandescent stylist who brings scintillating insight to her subject. As a student, a young priest whom his brother had tried to shelter was captured, hanged, drawn and quartered. It won the overall Waterstones Children's Book Prize [1] and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story, [2] and was short-listed for the Carnegie Medal.He is there in his work, always; but there are moments in his life where we must work out from fragments and clues what it was that he was doing: there is a long gap in his childhood, another after university, more after his marriage, and in his later years he flickers in and out of sight.

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The Merchant Taylors’ school had in its rules the stipulation, ‘unto their urine the scholars shall go to the places appointed them in the lane or street without the court’, which, assuming the interdiction was necessary for a reason, suggests the school would have smelled strongly of youthful pee. The challenge for any biographer is to delve into the apparent contradictions between the two Donnes, the piratical Jack who sailed with Raleigh to Cadiz and who wrote brilliant sonnets, rich in witty paradox and bold sexual assertion, and the prelate Dr John, who eventually became dean of St Paul’s; an accomplishment, Rundell tells us, that owed as much to his networking skills as it did to his considerable ability at preaching.He was born and baptised a Catholic at a time when the faith was regarded with fear and suspicion, and his younger brother Henry, imprisoned in Newgate for harbouring a Catholic priest, died in 1594. Rundell] nimbly captures Donne in all his guises as well as the historical period in which he lived . Each this and that’: his work suggests that we might voyage beyond the blunt realities of male and female. He was often hopeless, often despairing, and yet still he insisted at the very end: it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished.